Yiddish for Pirates(15)

May they rest in peace. Aleyhem ha’shalom.

The soldiers: their time will come.

When parrots and Jews take over the world.

When is that?

When the Messiah comes to earth and shines my shoes.

When I get shoes.

My luck, they’ll be horseshoes.

The garrotted bodies were carried by pairs of soldiers, then secured to stakes planted throughout the square in a mockery of trees. Then a marquesa stepped from the platform, her brocaded skirts fluttering behind her. A priest passed her a lit torch, and, after a nod from another, she made the sign of the cross over her own mortal body and touched the torch to the kindling at the foot of the stake. The pyre ignited, a burning bush inverted.

The greatest pain wasn’t apparent in the quickly sagging body, curling in the heat, the yellow sack now florid with real fire. It was in the burning horror on the face of the girl, on the faces of the still living, the about-to-die.

A shout like a shtoch in hartsn, a stab in the heart, from somewhere in the crowd. A brief commotion as someone collapsed. The soldiers looked over. The crowd attempted to become invisible. The commotion stilled.

Another brocaded dybbuk descended the stairs and received a lighted torch. Then another. The faces of the living burned even more fiercely. The girl gasped for air, her shoulders heaving.

The living bound in ropes. The broken taken from their cages, each carried then tied to a stake. This time several of the lords stepped from the platform and received torches. The girl sank to her knees.

First one, then several of the bound began to sing in desperate voices, the Sh’ma, the central affirmation of the Jewish faith.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One …”

“Adonai Eloheinu, the world ends. Soon the Messiah will come,” a man beside us shouted. He was quickly overpowered, brought down by the fists and feet of a band of cursing men.

The girl sobbing on her hands and knees.

Moishe crouched close to her.

In the middle of such tsuris, such misery, she was the painful centre of the world. And beautiful.

Moishe’s mind became a syrup of ragged light and electricity. I could almost see the girl being imprinted into the brain of this boychik, like this boychik had imprinted on me.

“Moishe,” he said to her. It was a naming, a consolation, an explanation for something he had no other words for.

An affirmation.

Then he turned and ran, a loud snap behind him as kindling at the foot of the remaining stakes burst into flame and the crowd cheered.





Chapter Seven



We ducked into an alley. It’s a paradox if a parrot ducks, but in this case, it would have been a good idea because: Blam!

A shtik fleysh mit tsvey oygn—a piece of meat with two eyes—hit me right in the punim with his fist and I fell off Moishe’s shoulder. They hit the bird when they want the boy. I fell to the ground and our narration almost ended here, with me farkakte, looking up at the thin blue sky above the alleyway.

A gangly shmendrick of a man looked down at me.

“Splinterwit,” he said. “You ran into my fist. Who are you running from?”

“The wrong person, obviously,” Moishe said.

The shmendrick pointed at the small shuttered window of a goldsmith’s shop. “I was breaking in. If it weren’t for your stupid bird, I’d’ve been inside already.”

I attempted to return to Moishe’s shoulder but I’d hurt my wing.

Moishe held out his hand. I climbed on and he lifted me back onto his shoulder. His other head. His second thoughts.

“Miguel,” Moishe said, introducing himself to the shmendrick. “I’m … a sailor. They were going to sell me but I escaped.”

“They call me Diego,” the shmendrick said.

And perhaps it was true.





Diego gave us directions to the place where we would meet the secret Jews. The Catedral de Sevilla, the enormous cathedral that stood over the city. An old mosque dressed in Christian drag. We didn’t require the convolutions of complex directions: its bell tower, La Giralda, once a minaret, pointed like a giant finger toward heaven. We’re number one.

But, nu, perhaps it was a middle finger flipping the Christian bird toward a displaced Allah.

In the Rabbi’s letter of introduction, there was a fragment of a two-hundred-year-old poem by Judah Halevi, the famous Spanish-Jewish poet. Moishe would say the first line and the contact would answer with the second.

A Jewish password.

Save my beard from a haircut. Two bits.

The plan wasn’t to walk up and shpritz old poetry at just anyone. Moishe was to find the man who tended the candles beside the largest of the cathedral’s five naves.

The cathedral was big as Babel, a vast Ararat looming over the city, the largest man-made thing that we’d ever seen. And still, after nearly a century, they hadn’t finished building.

Like that joke that is itself older than creation: Lord, it took only six whole days for you to create heaven and earth, but even you had to wait for the weekend.

Nervously, Moishe walked through the vast front doors. A fully rigged ship could pass through such doors, if the captain could get the crew to shlepp it.

We plunged into the candlelit twilight of the cathedral. The aurora borealis of stained glass: our brainstems replaced by kaleidescopes.